While not all the reviews for Cabin in the Woods have been favorable, I have no doubt it’s going to be a big crowd pleaser, and as a long time horror fan myself, I had great fun with it.
As we’ve reported previously on TG, the movie pulled quite a unique hat trick by paying tribute to many horror films, and by being something completely different at the same time.
So with Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s love letter to the genre hitting this past Friday the 13th, naturally enough, at least one website has looked back on the Friday the 13th movies, and slasher films are absolutely a part of 80’s nostalgia today for many fans.
If you were coming of age back then, slasher films were the forbidden, which is why so many people wanted to see them, much like Hostel and The Human Centipede today.
Halloween of course launched the mad slasher genre, and the major studios quickly got in the horror game buying up Friday the 13th, and for about four years mad slasher flicks dominated horror until Wes Craven reinvented things with A Nightmare on Elm Street. While the Friday the 13th movies don’t hold up very well today, Moviefone came up with a humorous list of reasons why they’re still cool, in a tongue in cheek way of course.
Among Moviefone’s facetious reasons, Jason’s been in outer space, Crispin Glover was in a Friday the 13th movie, part four, which was supposed to be “The Final Chapter,” the first Friday is a good movie to bring up when playing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon because he was in the first one, and of course, “Producers titled the fourth installment The Final Chapter… then had the audacity to make another seven movies. They then called the ninth movie The Final Friday… and made three more movies after that.”
Don’t forget another interesting little bit of trivia, Friday the 13th 3D was the most successful 3D movie of its time when 3D had a little six month comeback back in 1983. Also the hockey mask is one of the coolest killer masks in any horror flick, along with that creepy blank face Michael Myers wears in Halloween. It took three movies for Jason to finally find that look, he wore a potato sack in the second one, and like the old cliché goes, “Man, that look is REALLY you!”
With a lot of mad slasher films from back in the day, a lot of people look back at them fondly because nostalgia is about where you were back then. A lot of the movies don’t hold up today, but thinking back on them brings back memories for me too, just as much as Atari video games, my regular visits to Chuckie Cheese, watching MTV circa 1983-84, eating Reeses Pieces in honor of E.T., and spending hours trying to figure out my Rubik’s cube.
